


Anchor

by Le_Tournesol



Series: Sunflower’s H/C Fics [11]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Established Relationship, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, LOL I FORGOT TO WRITE A SUMMARY WHOOPS, Lance is a good boyfriend, M/M, Nightmares, established klance, will I ever write something with an actual plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-05
Updated: 2019-06-05
Packaged: 2020-04-08 12:29:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19107115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Le_Tournesol/pseuds/Le_Tournesol
Summary: Keith’s dreams are disorienting; luckily, he’s got Lance to keep him anchored.





	Anchor

**Author's Note:**

> Wait didn’t I already write a Klance nightmare thing? Haven’t I already written sleepy Klance? Yes, yes, I have, apparently I have a Thing.

Keith doesn’t wake with a start.

There’s no frenetic energy, no noise, no jerky movements 

No, he wakes in phases, in sticky syrup that gums his eyes together and drags him back down every time he tries to breach the surface. 

He thinks he’s awake, but he’s not awake. 

He thinks he’s awake, but he’s not awake.

He thinks he’s awake, but he’s not awake.

It’s a dream within a dream, but it’s so viscerally real that anxiety floods his system and makes it hard to breathe, makes it hard to think past this cloying fog of unreality. 

It’s so thick he drowns in it, sinks in it. 

He can’t see. 

He can’t  _ see.  _

The world is a blur, and he is helpless to fight it. He blinks like his vision will clear, blinks, but it does nothing. Everything is fuzzy. All of his senses are dulled, his body feels wrong, but he can’t  _ see _ , and it’s terrifying. 

A disorienting mishmash of color undulates and twists in his vision, and he feed trapped, feels like he’s suffocating. 

He thinks he’s awake, but he’s not awake. 

He thinks he’s awake, but he’s not awake.

He thinks he’s awake, but he’s not awake.

The cycle repeats.

Even he doesn’t believe anything is real when his eyes flicker open and his room comes into hazy focus. 

His head pounds, relentless, and it feels like he’s been stuffed full of wool and the pressure is uncomfortable, unpleasant.

His neck is stiff, and he’s sweat through his t-shirt, which clings to his skin and makes him shiver. He’s hot, but he’s freezing. 

It’s hard to get his limbs working, hard to get his thoughts to cooperate. They pass by like languid clouds; there, but out of his reach. 

Fumbling, he makes it upright, and his stomach roils and the pain in his head intensifies on a spot right over his left eye. 

A garbled sound escapes him, but otherwise the room is quiet and still. A fan whirs quietly in the corner, but it’s so rhythmic that it fails to soothe Keith’s worries.

Is he awake? Is he really awake now? 

Is he still trapped in his blankets, trapped in his body, trapped in a dream?

The room is out of focus, and it makes him nauseous and chills him at the same time because he can’t  _ see _ .

_ Glasses _ , he tries to tell his panic.  _ Contacts _ .

He has those now. He had them when he was a child, too, but he grew out of them, didn’t get a new pair until Lance remarked on his  _ frankly shitty aim  _ and speculation led to an Altean eye exam two decaphoebs ago. 

He closes his eyes and stumbles out of bed, ignoring the comforter that pools on the floor and the pillow that teeters and follows it. 

He feels blindly,  _ blindly _ , for the bathroom door because he doesn’t want to look at the myopic kaleidoscope of colors right now. It’s too much like the dream, and it makes him feel like vomiting. 

Groping, he finds the panel and the door slides open with a gust of air. He crosses the threshold, doesn’t bother with his glasses because they’re  _ not enough _ , okay, he can still see the watercolors outside the scope of the frames, and rips open a new packet of contacts. 

One, two, blink. 

The first goes in without problem, but the second folds and drops back to his hand. He unfurls it, holds his eyelid out of the way, tries again.

Blinks.

It hurts a little bit, dried against his skin a bit, but everything snaps into bright clarity.

But he still doesn’t feel right.

He stares at the mirror, lets his eyes dart around the room, worries that he switched his prescription for each eye because of course they couldn’t match. 

Eventually the vivacity settles and the funhouse quality fades away. 

He washes his face, brushes his teeth, and considers staggering back to the bed because his head still hurts and he just feels off, but the idea of getting horizontal, twisted in sheets, makes his skin crawl, like it will smother him alive, steal his senses, snuff him out like an unneeded candle. 

Cringing, Keith wishes he weren’t alone right now because nothing feels right, nothing feels  _ real _ .

But Lance had a mission, left in the wee hours of the morning after pressing a kiss to Keith’s forehead, lips, brushing the hair off is face, whispering  _ I love you, baby.  _

And then a pernicious sort of sleep sunk its claws into him, dragged him under, blinded him, and he woke up, woke up, woke up, woke up alone. 

He doesn’t change out of his pajamas, Lance’s long sleep pants and a black t-shirt, but he leaves their room for the lounge on the same floor.

He wants to look for people, but his head feels too heavy for the trip, so he settles for a new environment. 

It helps a little. 

He leans upright against the arm rest and shivers, hopes the cold will wake him up. He watches the video that Pidge left queued up the night before on the Altean-equivalent of a TV. 

The headache doesn’t recede.

After half a varga passes, he considers food as an option to break him out of his stupor, like his blood sugar is just low.

He returns to his room, pulls on his leggings and boots, wanders to the empty kitchen and makes a bowl of food goo, tries to watch a broadcast on his Holopad for noise, stimulation, company, because he feels so fucking alone and the walls are closing in. 

He gives up on this too, but he pops a few pain tablets for his head before he heads to the training deck.

 

Between the pills and the exertion, he feels significantly better, not perfect, but better. 

There’s still something uncoordinated in his limbs, heavy, and he’s still not completely right, but it’s bearable. He can ignore it, mostly. 

He eventually finds Coran and Shiro, talks with them for awhile, and they don’t notice anything off about him, though Shiro asks if he’s tired, tells him to rest up. Regardless, he feels lighter still after the conversation, almost normal. 

He goes about his day as usual, if a bit behind schedule from the slow start, and the vargas stretch into the late evening. 

He’s tired, but he’s not tired, afraid of the creeping sensation just under his skin, waiting to immobilize him again, blind him, desensitize.

Most of the team are back from their various missions, so they huddle in the lounge room and watch some alien film that is disconcertingly similar to a movie Keith’s seen before but can’t place. 

The others start to drop off into sleep or excuse themselves for bed, and Allura carries Pidge to her room like she weighs no more than a sack of flour. Shiro claps him on the shoulder and tells him he should go ahead and turn in, reminds him that Lance and Hunk weren’t expected to get back for several more vargas.

Keith nods with no intention of complying. 

The Casteship is quiet again. 

He feels worse. 

He should take his contacts out, they’re dry and sticking, but he puts it off.

Putters around to procrastinate, paces a few of the more popular floors, steers clear of the observation rooms and the vast, silent expanse of the solar system in favor of the bright, noisy bridge with its flashing lights and fancy tech. 

He’s fighting a losing battle.

His eyelids are heavy. 

He realizes that it’s nearly been a full quitant since he woke up this morning, the vargas running together, that the others will be waking up again soon.

It feels like he sleepwalked his way through it. 

Unwilling to be caught with dark circles under his eyes on the bridge, Keith finally goes back to their room. He grabs the pillows off the bed, doesn’t bother changing, and then he goes back to the lounge room. He stacks the pillows against the arm of the couch, curls around them so he’s mostly sitting up, pulls a blanket over himself, turns the TV back on to a low volume.

The light flickers, and he can tell the difference even with his eyes closed, which is good, which is fine. 

It’s fine. 

It’s less daunting than their bed, laying flat and alone in that quiet, waiting to be sucked back into the mad swirl of of his dreams, where colors melt together like wax in the sun, where he can’t  _ see _ , where he’ll suffocate. 

This is fine. 

He’s fine. 

He leaves his contacts in. 

He falls asleep. 

 

“Baby?” Lance’s voice is just above a whisper. His hand is warm on Keith’s shoulder. “Keith?”

Keith cracks his eyes open, and he’s awash in  _ blue.  _ Lance’s eyes are soft, gentle, and his hair is still damp from the shower. 

“Hey,” Lance says when he’s sure Keith is awake. He smoothes a hand through his hair and his lips twitch into a sweet, sleepy smile, “Come to bed?” 

Lance kneels next to him on the cushions and looks at him with nothing but love, radiates warmth and safety. 

And Keith says, “Okay.” 

He takes the proffered hand Lance offers him, lets him pull him free of the blanket cocoon and lead him back to their room, lets him tug him into their bed, tuck his body against him, chest to back. 

Lance pulls the messy blankets over them, doesn’t ask why they were left in the floor, presses a kiss to the nape of Keith’s neck, wraps him up in his secure embrace. 

It doesn’t feel stifling. 

It feels like an anchor, like Lance will tether him to safety, never let him drift too far, like a lifeguard on surveying the waves from the beach. 

In the morning Lance will fret over his bloodshot eyes, remind him not to sleep in his contacts, make him wear his glasses to give his eyes a break. 

But for now Keith is no longer afraid of drowning, and he falls asleep, safe and sound in the arms around him.

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired entirely by the nightmare I had the night before last. I’m on a medication with a side effect that causes Super Realistic nightmares, which is fun. 
> 
> A little different from my usual cadence. I have a lot of run-on sentences; I wanted it to feel soupy. Like the warm soupy feeling when you’re dozing, but maybe dialed up to something that feels a little suffocating.
> 
> Hope you enjoyed! 
> 
>  
> 
> [Follow me on tumblr!](https://sunflower-le-tournesol.tumblr.com/)


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